Matthew Skyrm’s .Plan in Japan

I was just out a little while ago walking down Palo Alto’s University Ave. (I live .5 blocks away) and had a look at the line outside the Apple store.

As expected, tons of nerds with laptops camping out with the obligatory local news van outside.

I was surprised by a few things: Around half of the laptops I saw were not Macs and I am about 92.5% sure that the guy first in line is actually a local homeless/semi-homeless guy. Perhaps somebody is paying him to hold the spot.

I did take a bunch of photos with my production sample Cingular branded Nokia N80 (which DOES have UMTS/WCDMA 3G on the AT&T network, unlike the iPhone) but unfortunately something was buggy and none of the photos were saved to the MiniSD card.

I may stop by tomorrow before 6PM to snap some more photos. If so, I’ll post here.

Update: Graeme and I just stopped by the Apple store again around 6:05PM and it was total mayhem. Steve Jobs himself was inside (see 7th photo of inside of Apple store with the back of a guy with black shirt and light colored hat — that was SJ.) We then went to University Cafe for a drink and saw some Japanese people taking photos of their iPhones.

Here are the photos taken with Graeme’s N95.

Steve Jobs^^^^

Update 2: Looks like someone managed to catch a video of Steve Jobs at the Apple Store at the same time I was there eagerly snapping photos of his back. Check out the video here.

Also, Andrea kindly took some photos for me of the nerds waiting in line during the day on Friday since my N80 flaked out the night before. Obligatory guy with white beard and lawn chair present, of course.

I must admit, I truly love to read Apple rumors. Now I’m going to start my own rumor.

Apple to release new Cinema Displays with built-in iSight cameras that work on Mac and Windows out of the box!

Let me explain…

The other day I was checking out Apple’s Leopard site and came across something interesting on the Photo Booth page….

Let’s look closely at the text:

USB Camera eh? Apple doesn’t sell those! Well, let’s remember in the Mac OS X 10.4.9 release notes some months back there was mention of “…iChat support for USB Video Class webcams.” While Yahoo! Messenger and Skype have had support for non-Apple USB webcams on the Mac for ages, iChat has always been basically an iSight-only affair (let’s not count the other Firewire cameras…)

So the iSight standalone firewire camera has not been sold since last year. Obviously Mac Mini and Mac Pro owners need something… So which USB camera is Apple talking about?

Let’s dig a little deeper…

Apple is now supporting “USB Video Class” or UVC cameras in iChat and Photo Booth. This is a big deal because in order to receive the full Windows Vista logo on the box, USB webcams have to support UVC and that basically means all new webcams will be UVC. That means Windows XP sp2, Vista, Linux, and now Mac OS X support right out of the box with no driver necessary for all new webcams!

So, will Apple start selling cameras from Creative Labs and Logitech at their stores? I doubt it. They just don’t aesthetically fit.

I believe Apple has gone through this trouble so that when the Cinema Displays with iSight come out, the built-in iSight will be UVC and thus will work right-out-of-the-box-plug-and-play-no-drivers-necessary with Mac OS X, Windows Vista, Windows XP sp2, and Linux!

Goal: Easily share the latest high resolution photos of my son with the rest of my family without a bunch of BS. Photocasting looked like just the right solution…

Step 1: Get everybody in my family on a Mac running iPhoto 6. — Check

Step 2: Upload photos of my son to my expensive .Mac Flickr Pro account. — Check

Step 3: Get Flickr’s RSS feed URL and send out with instructions to use as a Photocast. — Check

Step 4: Everybody is happy. — Not so much….

The Flickr RSS feeds only had the most recent 10 or 20 photos in a pathetically low resolution that looked pixelated and disappointing when running a nice iPhoto slideshow on my mom’s 17″ C2D iMac or my father-in-law’s BlackBook.

Enter: photocastr

Thankfully the good folks at Flickr have a powerful API that QuantumFoam put to good use to make photocastr.

Simply put, photocastr creates a perfect Photocast/RSS feed of up to 250 of your most recent high resolution Flickr photos. It has a lot more great ways to tweak your feed (or photos from others) but the basics were more than enough to make me and my family happy campers. Thanks QuantumFoam!

Update: I found a pretty major flaw in that photocastr and iPhoto strictly limit the photos in the photocast to the most recent 250. If you have 250 and then upload another 10 to flickr, your iPhoto subscribers won’t have 260, they’ll lose the oldest 10 photos.

If you download Podcasts and use iTunes, you’ve probably noticed the disorganized mess that your library has become due to the lack of standardization and suitability of Podcast ID3 tags when using iTunes. The problem is even worse when you are trying to navigate your music or Podcasts using the little screen on your iPod. To solve this problem, I’ve come up with an AppleScript that I call Podcast Cleaner. As this was my first AppleScript, and I was shooting for quick results rather than elegance, the code is another disorganized mess to say the least. It does, however, do the job.

The way it works is as follows — I hardcode the name of each Podcast’s Playlist (iPodder Lemon creates a playlists for each Podcast), then I further hardcode the new Genre/Artist/Album for each Podcast I subscribe to. Lastly, I take the existing Song Name, Album, and Artist and concatenate that all together and replace the Song Name with the result. I use an unused field in the ID3 tag to indicate whether a file has been “cleaned” and check it first so I don’t “clean” the same file twice.

Due to all the hardcoding, I have to edit the AppleScript every time I subscribe to a new Podcast or a Podcast changes its name. Other than that, it’s pretty seamless. I simply run Podcast Cleaner each morning before I synchronize my iPod with the latest Podcasts.

See the screenshot below of my nice clean iTunes Library.

Click this link Podcast Cleaner.zip to download my personal version of Podcast Cleaner. To use it, you’ll firstly need a Macintosh; Windows doesn’t support AppleScript. Secondly, edit the file to suit your particular list of Podcasts (should be self explanatory and obviously amateur to anyone that has taken a basic programming class) and place into “/Users/username/Library/Scripts” without the quotes and substituting username with your username. You may need to create the Scripts folder yourself.

I am not sure how iTunes 4.9 will handle Podcasts, but I’m hoping I won’t need Podcast Cleaner anymore.